The art of doing useless things efficiently

In my 35 years of giving advice to managers, I’ve witnessed countless bizarre corporate phenomena made by otherwise highly-intelligent managers heroically perfecting work processes that shouldn’t even exist, even in companies with enough ISO certificates to wallpaper a stadium.

I call this the “Olympic-level polishing of a brick.” You can buff it and shine it, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a useless brick. Why on earth are we spending immense amounts of time, talent and treasure to do useless things with flawless efficiency?

Managers impose volumes of irrational practices requiring multiple signatures that create delays, a 50-page weekly report that no one reads or an incredibly complex software feature that no one appreciates. Their teams cross-check every detail, loop through five departments and execute every task flawlessly.

Surprisingly, one of the best illustrations of this management mistake doesn’t come from a business school. It comes from a Greek artist who specializes in making everyday objects spectacularly useless. Introducing Katerina Kamprani, a Greek architect and designer who is known for creating brilliant, but mind-bending collection titled “The Uncomfortable.”

Kamprani’s design is simple and yet devious. She takes perfectly mundane, everyday objects and introduces a minor but psychotic change, often a highly precise structural alteration that makes them completely and gloriously self-defeating:

One, the treacherous “watering can,” where the spout curves directly backward, pouring water straight back into its container like a liquid boomerang.

Two, the hilariously cruel “open-toed rain boots” that generously allow water to seep inside the boots, and finally, the “concrete umbrella” – an object beautifully molded into the shape of an ordinary umbrella, but cast in heavy, solid concrete so that no mere human can lift it without a massive forklift.

On the surface, these objects are humorous, surrealist jokes. But to a seasoned Kaizen and Lean Thinker (KLT), Kamprani’s gallery is a visual encyclopedia of operational wastes.

Drucker’s warning

Kamprani’s transformation of an ordinary object toward uselessness lies at the heart of a business theory. Peter Drucker (1909-2005), the father of modern management, captured this systemic flaw perfectly when he observed that “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Drucker drew a sharp, non-negotiable line between efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things). When an organization loses sight of effectiveness, it begins to treat speed, optimization and cost-reduction as goals in themselves, completely detached from real customer value.

Kamprani’s art is a literal, physical manifestation of Drucker’s warning: it shows exactly what happens when we maximize engineering efficiency to create something that fails fundamentally at being effective.

They are classic masterpieces of effort that yields zero utility. They teach us that true excellence is not about how beautifully we execute a task; it is about whether that task needs to happen at all.

Defining value

KLT is entirely anchored on the perspective of the end user. Value is defined strictly by what the customer is willing to pay for. Kamprani’s genius lies in her ability to isolate the exact mechanism of value and systematically destroy it. But who appreciates her work?

Maybe, the art patrons. But, Kamprani admits they’re “for fun; they don’t have any purpose…it works more on the educational side.”

It’s the same thing when we practice KLT. We must train our eyes to look at our current operations through Kamprani’s lens. We must ask ourselves: Where are we making our employees or our customers uncomfortable through poor design?

When a factory operator walks across a room to grab a tool or when a customer has to input the same data into three separate forms, we have handed them Kamprani’s watering can. We are asking them to do their jobs using tools that actively fight against them.

Therefore, the next time you walk a shop floor or review your value streams, look for the artistic absurdities hiding in plain sight. Stop celebrating the heroic effort of wearing an open-toed rain boots or lifting a concrete umbrella.

Use KLT to design processes that people can use without fighting them because the goal isn’t to build the world’s most efficient concrete umbrella, but to keep people dry.

Rey Elbo is a quality and productivity activist. Send your comment, question, or story to [email protected] or via Facebook, LinkedIn, X or https://reyelbo.com